Re bundling the interpreter with every program: If Perl 6 moves more features out of the core as promised, it should continue to shrink. The perl DLL from ActiveState is currently 600K, up a bit from older versions. That's not too terribly large. Compare that against vbrun*.dll which as I recall was over a meg, years ago when that meant something. In Visual BASIC, a program didn't have to ship the DLL; it could provide it separatly just in case. With a web-install ability to just download needed parts, I think this can work with Perl software too. For distributing on media, like a CD, just include everything.

Basically, we are talking about good installer technology here. The Perl interpreter and library collection would be self-maintaining, so people could use it without developing for it.

—John